Category: Violence

The DA is Right: Robertino DeAngelis Should Be Tried as a Juvenile

May 19, 2009
LegalViolence
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From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

In yet another twist on an already strange case, the family of a Mt. Lebanon girl injured in a 2007 hammer attack yesterday launched a public campaign to force the district attorney to press to have her alleged attacker tried as an adult.

Calling it “Adult Time for Adult Crime,” the family of Sarah DeIuliis has retained a South Hills public relations firm, and opened a Web site as well as a page on Facebook to demand that Robertino DeAngelis, 17, be tried as an adult for the attack. The Web site provides an e-mail address and telephone number for the DA’s office for visitors to use in pressing the case.

“It is our contention that the district attorney’s office presented an ineffective case against DeAngelis,” said Grace DeIuliis, Sarah’s mother, in a release issued by Forge Communications. “Trying this defendant as an adult should have been a no-brainer.”

The family hired a PR firm to force the case to adult court.  Without knowing all the details — and we do not — the case is tragic on many levels:

The hiring of a PR firm for a public campaign to force the case back into criminal court marked the latest turn in a public spectacle growing out of the Oct. 31, 2007, attack. Police charged Mr. DeAngelis with attempted homicide, saying he beat Ms. DeIuliis with a hammer when the pair met to exchange property after they broke up. Police said the attack was halted by an off-duty county detective who was nearby, and Mr. DeAngelis then attempted to kill himself by jumping in front of a light rail transit train.

He survived, but his lawyer, Patrick Thomassey, says he has undergone multiple surgeries.

The criminal justice system must seek justice at all times, not vengance.

The DA is right in this case, and the victim’s family can do irreperable harm to the case by these continued attempts to try the Mr. DeAngelis in the media.

Erie PA Officer James Cousins Mocks Black Murder Victim

May 17, 2009
RaceRantStrangeViolence
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Officer James Cousins II would rather you not see this.  He requested that it be pulled from the Internet.

This is Officer James Cousins mocking the death of Rondale Jennings Sr., son of Yvette Jennings, of Erie, PA.  The video has “upended race relations” in Erie, Pennsylvania’s fourth largest city.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

For nearly eight minutes, Erie police Officer James Cousins II was captured on a cell phone camera mocking the death of Ms. Jennings’ son, Rondale Jennings Sr., 31, who was shot in the head outside a local bar on March 28. The officer also imitated Ms. Jennings’ response when she saw her son at the crime scene, and joked about using a Taser on a suspect in another incident.

At the time he was recorded, Officer Cousins, who is white, was off duty and drinking with friends at another bar.

“It was sickening. It was hurtful,” Ms. Jennings said last week. “He described the exact moment when I saw my son’s face.”

Officer Cousins was suspended for 10 days without pay after the video surfaced. He wrote an apology to Ms. Jennings, and he is now on desk duty until he receives psychological testing.

Again from the video:

In the video, Officer Cousins seems visibly intoxicated as he imitates Mr. Jennings’ shaking body. He also jokes about the bullet hole in the victim’s forehead, claiming the body was lying under a malt liquor sign that said “take it to the head.”

He told his friends, “One less drug dealer to deal with. Cool.”

He also called Mr. Jennings a “turd,” which some viewers interpreted to be a racial epithet.

Both the NAACP and the FOP are weighing in now.

The constant media coverage has angered rank-and-file Erie police officers, said Sgt. Kensill of the FOP.

“Police are under a microscope,” he said. Officer Cousins has admitted his mistake, and any further punishment would be unfair, he said. The officer could not be reached for comment.

Yet Ms. Jennings isn’t satisfied with the officer’s apology, calling it insincere.

“In every job, there are people that don’t belong in the field. I feel like Officer Cousins is in the wrong field,” she said. “He lacks the ethics and values to be an officer. I don’t trust him.”

This was not a “mistake,” and we are hard pressed to imagine that this is the only time Officer Cousins has made remarks like this.  This is the only time Officer Cousins has been caught making remarks like this.

Officer Cousins defined his legacy, all by himself.

What Does the ‘Baby Shaker’ iPhone App Say About Apple?

April 24, 2009
StrangeViolence
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Sometimes, you just have to shake your head in bufuddlement.

Somehow, someone at Apple thought it would be acceptable to release a “Baby Shaker” game for the iPhone.  The game is simple and simple-minded: an image of an infant is presented on the screen, and when you shake the iPhone hard enough, two red “Xs” appear over the infants eyes.

Mission accomplished: the baby is dead.  You are scored on how quickly you can kill the infant.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Here’s a lesson in the obvious: Making fun of shaken baby syndrome — or any other type of traumatic brain injury — doesn’t make for uproarious comedy or light entertainment. It’s also not great for public relations.

Apple just learned that lesson the hard way. The company apologized Thursday for selling a 99-cent iPhone application called “Baby Shaker” in its online store. The application allowed iPhone users to silence a virtual crying infant by shaking the device. After enough shakes, the baby on the screen stopped screaming and a large red “X” appeared over each eye. Apple first posted the application Monday, the start of Shaken Baby Syndrome Awareness Week.

“Anybody with any decency would be appalled by this,” said Jennipher Dickens, the mother of a child with the syndrome and a spokeswoman for the Sarah Jane Brain Foundation. “An application that simulates killing a baby, because it’s crying? What sick person would come up with that?”

I don’t care for the iPhone for a number of reasons (See: Why iDon’t Like the iPhone At All).  But an application to simulate the death of an infant?

Apple can have their iPhone.

Jordan Brown, 11, Should Be Charged as a Juvenile

March 24, 2009
gun controlLegalViolence
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Jordan Brown

Tragic news out of Wampum, PA:

The 11-year-old boy accused of shooting and killing his father’s pregnant fiancée is due in court on Tuesday.

Kenzie Houk, 26, was eight months pregnant when, police said, Jordan Brown shot and killed her at her home in Wampum in Lawrence County.

Brown, who was charged as an adult in the case, is expected to appear in court on charges of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors have said his motive may have been jealousy.

There is no good way to resolve this situation.  A woman and her unborn child are dead.

But an 11-year-old boy being charged as an adult with first degree murder?

This is insane.

The crime is horrible.  Punishing this child as an adult is insane. And a crime.

Gregory Robinson Died a Hero at 14

March 14, 2009
ChicagoChicagolandgun controlRantViolence
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Fourteen years old, and Gregory Robinson is gone.

He sounds like someone you would have admired.

Hearing gunshots, Robinson tried to protect a 10-month-old and a 4-year-old, and was shot dead.

Greg was not the target, according to police.

I call once again for more funding for Ceasefire Chicago, the organization with the most comprehensive approach to ending the violence.

Why do we shoot each other?  We could debate endlessly.  For all our discussion, it happened again.

We need gun control.  No, not necessarily fewer guns.  We simply need to contol our  guns, control ourselves.

We have the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.  We have so much freedom in this country. Why can we not control ourselves?

I’m crying for this one.  From the Sun-Times:

Robinson’s cousin, Brandon Orange, who was in the front seat of the car, said he heard what sounded like 30 gunshots being fired at the Chevrolet Malibu as his sister, Brittani Orange, was making a U-turn to park in front of her family’s home.

Brandon Orange shielded his sister, while Robinson tried to protect Brittani Orange’s 10-month-old son, Antonio Porterfield, and 4-year-old goddaughter Sinyiia Bennett, who were with him in the backseat.

When he saw that his cousin slumped over in the back seat, Brandon Orange said, “I didn’t think it was real. Not Greg. He never said or did anything to anybody.”

Robinson suffered a gunshot wound to the back, the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office said. He was pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn at 11:35 p.m.

No other passengers inside the vehicle were injured, Chicago Police said.

This young man died a hero in a city that SHOULD NOT HAVE THESE PROBLEMS.

Chicago wants to host the 2016 Olympics, but Gregory Robinson won’t see them.

Chicago gangs need to do the unthinkable, and talk to each other.  Someone out there reading this belongs to a gang, and must know that what happened to Gregory Robinson is wrong.  This needs to stop.

Twenty-eight Chicago Public School students have died this year.

“You’re going to see more of that unfortunately,” Mayor Daley said Saturday, speaking at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Why?

Active Bomb Found Near Bar at Western Illinois University

February 28, 2009
IllinoisViolence
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From the Western Courier:

An active bomb was found Saturday near the beer garden of a Macomb bar frequented by Western Illinois University students.

According to a release by the Macomb Police Department, a suspected improvised explosive device, or IED, was found at the Change of Pace Bar, 301 N. Campbell St., at 10:30 a.m. Saturday.

Members of the state bomb squad came to Macomb and used its robotic bomb recovery equipment to secure the IED. It was determined device was an active bomb that had not yet been detonated. Bomb squad members destroyed the device at a secure location.

McDonough County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Chris Mason said the bomb was a small device with some shotgun shells hooked to it and a radio attached. He said this type of device could be sensitive to cell phone calls nearby.

There are no suspects at this time.  Very frightening.

Read full story here.

3 Teens Shot Dead on Chicago’s Southeast Side

February 20, 2009
ChicagoChicagolandgun controlViolence
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Johnny Edwards was 13 years old.  He would have turned 14 on Monday.

The two other teens, boys aged 15 and 17, were students at Bowen High School, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

The 13-year-old, Johnny Edwards, was remembered Friday evening by family and neighbors as a helpful boy who played in after-school sports programs and loved math and science.

“He was humble,’’ his uncle John Johnson said. “He showed respect. He helped his brothers, his sisters and cousins with their homework. He liked to help people.’’

According to witnesses, the three victims were shot in different locations.

Supt. Jody Weis, who was on the scene after the shootings, said the teens were attacked by more than one shooter.

“It appears they were attacked by several individuals, one of which had an assault rifle,” Weis said at a news conference.

Another of the victims, Kendrick Pitts, 17, “about 10 days ago, was released from Cook County Juvenile Detention Center, where he had been for about three months for getting into fights,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

The 15-year-old victim was identified by friends and a law enforcement source as Raheem “Chiko” Washington, who attended Bowen High School, according to the Tribune.

I have not written about each and every young person who lost his or her life throughout Chicagoland, but I’ve noticed quite a few recorded in the posts of this blog.

I call once again for more funding for CeaseFire Chicago, the organization with the most comprehensive approach to ending the violence.

Why do we shoot each other?  We could debate endlessly.  For all our discussion, it happened again.

We need gun control.  No, not necessarily fewer guns.  We simply need to contol our  guns, control ourselves.

Once again, I simply offer a lone lament and my prayers for the families.

Obama to Close Gitmo: Nicely Done, Mr. President

January 22, 2009
AmericaBarack ObamaCivil LibertiesDemocratic NewsPhilosophicalViolenceWhite House
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In one day and a few strokes of the pen, President Obama signed an executive order that will close Guantanamo Bay prison within a year and prosecute terrorism suspects in the United States.

Granted, closing Gitmo is easier said than done:

Underscoring the difficult decisions Obama must make to fulfill his pledge of shutting down Guantanamo, the plan could require the creation of a new legal system to handle the classified information inherent in some of the most sensitive cases.

The issue is only so difficult because the Bush Administration dispensed with Habeas Corpus, and much of the United States Constitution with it.

With a few more strokes of the pen, President Obama banned torture.

To think that in 2009, it would take an act of the President of the United States to ban torture by the United States.

“Both civil libertarians and ex-CIA officials involved in interrogations and detentions policies hailed the changes,” says the Washington Independent.

Under the executive orders issued Thursday, the CIA’s interrogators cannot question detainees using “any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3.” That manual was rewritten by the Army in 2006 to reemphasize its compliance with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. laws banning torture. The Bush administration took an unyielding stance toward exempting CIA interrogations from that manual and those laws. But the Obama administration revoked all Bush administration executive orders from September 11, 2001 onward “concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals,” and directed the attorney general to conduct a thorough review of all other “directives, orders, and regulations” on the subject issued by the Bush administration that are no longer applicable.

Remember the Geneva Conventions?  They’re worth reviewing.  Seems we have a president who knows them, and desires to uphold them.

We all stand taller today.

Nicely done, Mr. President.

Two Chicago Teens Shot in the Head

December 4, 2008
ChicagoChicagolandCook CountyPhilosophicalViolence
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It’s a sad sign of the times when the Chicago Sun-Times has taken to writing one “two-fer” article to report on couple of recent shooting deaths in Chicago.

Today’s paper carries one story about two unrelated homicides from Wednesday, December 3.  According to police, Sergio Dukes, 18, was shot in the head twice and once in the chest in the 9600 block of South Indiana Avenue, after leaving a high school basketball game at Harlan High School.  Christopher Hanford, 19, was shot in the face in the 900 block of North Lawler Avenue, according to police.

Detectives are investigating both incidents, and no one is yet in custody.

Two lives lost, one article with barely any details about the men who died. Two unrelated lives lost in two unrelated instances, and one article article to show.

My criticism is not with the Sun-Times.  I know revenues have been down, there are fewer reporters, and there are oh-so-many homicides in Chicago.

Rather, I’m calling our attention to who we are once again, who we have become.  We hear no outrage from Chicago’s City Council or Mayor Daley on these deaths.  These men were not shot at the city’s lucrative Taste of Chicago.  The pols are not posturing as they did this summer.  No one is calling Jodi Weis in to testify this time.

Two men shot dead and nary a whimper.

We need to ask the big questions about who we have become as a society.

One group not afraid to ask the big questions is CeaseFire Chicago.  I heard CeaseFire make a presentation once at a workshop at Prairie State College.  They involve themselves with gang members for the express purpose of lessening gang violence.

From their Web site:

The Chicago Project has designed and tested a new intervention — CeaseFire — that approaches violence in a fundamentally different way than other violence reduction efforts. CeaseFire works with community-based organizations and focuses on street-level outreach, conflict mediation, and the changing of community norms to reduce violence, particularly shootings.

CeaseFire relies on highly trained outreach workers and violence interrupters, faith leaders, and other community leaders to intervene in conflicts, or potential conflicts, and promote alternatives to violence. CeaseFire also involves cooperation with police and it depends heavily on a strong public education campaign to instill in people the message that shootings and violence are not acceptable. Finally, it calls for the strengthening of communities so they have the capacity to exercise informal social control and to mobilize forces — from businesses to faith leaders, residents and others — so they all work in concert to reverse the epidemic of violence that has been with us for too long.

The group has had funding issues in the past, but received $400,000 in grants this past summer, thanks to U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis:

The U.S. Department of Justice has awarded two grants to CeaseFire to continue its violence intervention work in Chicago’s West Garfield Park and West Humboldt Park neighborhoods.

The grants from the Bureau of Justice Assistance at the Department of Justice total $400,000 and will allow CeaseFire, based at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health, to keep workers on the street to intervene and mediate conflicts and to stop shootings and killings.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-Chicago) expressed strong support for CeaseFire as an integral part of a comprehensive strategy to stop violence, especially shootings, in Chicago and elsewhere.

“In recent months, the Chicago area has seen an alarming increase in gang-related shootings and violence. Half of all homicides in Chicago have been linked to gangs,” Durbin said.

“We must continue to fight gang violence through a comprehensive strategy that prioritizes gang enforcement, prevention and intervention measures. Today’s grant for the CeaseFire program will help strengthen the overall effort to reduce gang violence in the region,” Durbin said.

“CeaseFire is an evidence-based program that really works, and we’re very pleased to see that the Justice Department is responding by providing some resources to work with it,” said Davis.

A recent three-year evaluation of CeaseFire, commissioned by the Department of Justice, validated the CeaseFire model as an intervention that reduces shooting and killings and makes communities safer. The report, led by Wesley Skogan of Northwestern University, found the program to be “effective,” with “significant” and “moderate-to-large impact,” and with effects that are “immediate.”

In one of the many missteps of his administration, Gov. Rod Blagojevich cut the state’s entire $6.2 million allocation for CeaseFire in August 2007.  In the aftermath of these cuts, 96 of the program’s 130 conflict mediators lost their jobs, and gang violence escalated yet again in Chicago.

Thanks to Durbin and Davis, CeaseFire has some solvency again.

But it’s not enough.

Mayor Daley and the rest of us need to whine about the killings again.  The State of Illinois needs to fund CeaseFire again.

We can’t afford any more “two-fer” homicide articles in the Sun-Times.

Brian Murdock and Quinton Buckner Are Dead

November 8, 2008
Barack ObamaChicagoChicagolandElectionsLegalPhilosophicalViolence
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The sad news hit the Chicago Sun-Times today:

The deaths of Brian Murdock, 15, and Quinton Buckner, 17, brought the total number of people killed to at least 447, according to reports from the Sun-Times News Group wire. At the end of 2007, 443 homicides were recorded in the city.

The total was only 441 through October 31, a 16.4%  increase over last year at the same time, according to the Sun-Times.  A mere seven days into November, there were six more murders in Chicago.

Why?  Again from the Sun-Times:

But since then, a 21-year-old man was shot in the head in Marquette Park, two men were found in a burning car near Hegewisch with multiple gunshot wounds and a 22-year-old man was shot and killed in a dice game in Englewood. Then the two teens were killed Thursday.

Chicago Police are following tips that the shooting was somehow linked to an armed robbery. No one has been charged.

Brian Murdock was found slumped against a fence when his father got to the block where the shooting happened.

According to reports, James Murdock had adopted Brian when the boy was 8 or 9.  He was planning on transfering is son out of Robeson High School because dad was worried about gang fights.  Brian had recently been talking to his father about his fear of being attacked.

Quinton Buckner was planning on serving this country in the armed forces:

Quinton Buckner was a motivated kid who wanted to play football in college and later become a Marine, said his older brother, Dennis Buckner, 22.

Dennis Buckner described his brother as a “good kid” who didn’t have any gang connections. Buckner said Quinton had two brothers and two sisters.

There has been a tremendous amount of euphoria surrounding the recent presidential election.  Chicago shined election night as President-Elect Obama spoke about Ann Nixon Cooper, age 106, a woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta.

Barack Obama spoke of the “heartache and hope” Cooper witnessed in the century-plus she’s been blessed to walk this earth:

She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.

And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can.

He continued the refrain, “Yes we can,” throughout the rest of his speech, almost reflectively at times.

The night of November 4, 2008, was pure magic in Chicago.  The crowd was united in hope.  The crowd cheered. The crowd behaved.  There were no tragic acts of violence.  Instead, there was hope.

“Yes we can.”

Perhaps Brian Murdock and Quinton Buckner heard those words as well.  Perhaps they smiled.  Perhaps they cheered.  Perhaps they even wept with joy, as did I.

Now, we weep for them, two more murders on Chicago’s South Side.

Brian Murdock and Quinton Buckner are dead.

And we are all less for their loss.